In the Media

The number of people leaving San Francisco based on the number of change of address forms filed in the city declined to 12,000 last year, down from about 48,000 in 2020 and 18,000 in 2021, according to change of address data from the US Postal Service collected by Riordan Frost, senior research analyst at Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.

The pandemic “greatly increased the importance of home,” said Chris Herbert, managing director for the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. “For everyone who was living, working, studying from home, and much of your social life was home, the value of having a place to gather was that much more important.”

"Homeownership has been a central way of building wealth, certainly all throughout the post-war period," says Chris Herbert, Managing Director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies. "Although I would say importantly, it was not an avenue that was open to many people of color, particularly African Americans."

Homeowners, excluding landlords and house flippers, spent $418 billion on home improvement and repair over the 12 months that ended Sept. 30, according to the Leading Indicator of Remodeling Activity, which was developed by Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

Granted, the past couple of years may have been an aberration; people went crazy for home remodeling during the pandemic. But even pre-pandemic research cuts against common understandings of how homeowners use their equity.

Homeowners spent $337 billion in improvements and repairs in 2020, $368 billion in 2021, and are projected to shell out $427 billion by the end of this year, according to data from the Joint Center for Housing Studies.

The income required to afford a home in, for example, the middle-third of the New York City area market in September 2019 was about $117,450, assuming a 30-year fixed rate mortgage, according to an analysis by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.

People in this group often face the reality that “it’s more expensive to get a smaller condo than the single family you’re selling — and that presumes the condo exists, which may not be the case,” said Jennifer Molinsky, director of the Housing an Aging Society Program at Harvard University.

Nationally, “household growth and new construction have been essentially coincident for the last seven or eight years,” said Chris Herbert, of Harvard. “Typically, housing construction exceeds household formation by about 20 percent, because we’re always removing housing that has outlived its useful life. We haven’t been doing that for a long time. Just by that very simple measure, we’re not building enough.”

“New England is predicted by some as being a receiver community,” said Carlos Martín, a project director at the Remodeling Futures Program at the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard. “I’m a little more skeptical of that because I think there are going to be places like Atlanta and Orlando that can continue to receive more population because they’re closer to where people want to be.”